Visa Announces $100 Million Investment in Generative AI for Commerce and Payments

Visa has launched a new $100 million generative artificial intelligence (AI) initiative to invest in companies focused on developing generative AI technologies and applications that will shape the future of commerce and payments.

The effort builds on Visa’s longstanding use of AI in payments and its commitment to driving innovation in the industry, the global payments company said in a press release on Monday, October 2.

Generative AI, an emerging subfield of AI, uses large language models (LLMs) to create general artificial intelligence that can generate text, images and other content from large amounts of existing data.

Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, Jack Forestell, said in the press release: “While much of generative AI so far has been focused on tasks and content creation, this technology will soon not only reshape how we live and work, but it will also meaningfully change commerce in ways we need to understand.”

According to the press announcement, Visa Ventures, the company’s worldwide corporate investment arm, will spearhead the generative AI ventures program. Visa Ventures has been supporting and collaborating with businesses that are advancing innovation in payments and commerce since 2007.

“With generative AI’s potential to be one of the most transformative technologies of our time, we are excited to expand our focus to invest in some of the most innovative and disruptive venture-backed startups building across generative AI, commerce, and payments,” stated David Rolf, head of Visa Ventures, in the release.

In May, PYMNTS reported that a new generation of AI tools that go beyond individual automation solutions have ushered in a new era for chief financial officers (CFOs). These tools free employees from less challenging tasks and extend people’s analytical capabilities in ways that contribute to key business goals.

In one application of this technology, AI can help collect data and turn it into signals that provide actionable information for fraud prevention, Michael Jabbara, vice president and global head of fraud services at Visa, told PYMNTS in an interview published in September.

AI, Jabbara said, is “he superpower that gives us the ability to detect that proverbial fraudulent needle in the overall haystack of legitimate interactions — and then build the automation necessary to carve out the fraud while letting the authentic transactions go through.”